Abstract
On the basis of legal, environmental, social, and economic factors, reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain issues have attracted attention among both academia and practitioners. A growing number of publications is an expression of reverse logistics trend in the literature which has been lasted for around 40 years. Hence, a comprehensive literature review of recent and state-of-the-art papers is vessential to draw a framework of the past, and to support researchers in their works by indicating journals or adequate references. The aim of this paper was to prepare appropriate literature review procedure and following it to review all papers whose main topis was reverse logistics. The papers were analyzed and categorized to construct a useful foundation of past research with respect to the scale of number of research on reverse logistics, considering stages of reverse logistics development, targeted journals, main research centres and leading countries. Moreover there were reccommended the most valuable papers as references.